OZU /AUSTRALIA /MELBOURNE /GUIDE
Melbourne’s neighbourhoods
5 h route4 stopsBest: Saturday morning at the markets. Any night in the northUpdated July 2026
Fitzroy, Collingwood and Brunswick are ten minutes from the centre by tram and they’re an entirely different city. That’s the first thing to understand about Melbourne: the centre’s grid is where people work and where the famous lanes are, but life is in the ring of suburbs around it, and each has its character, its main street and its tribe.
The city orders itself by compass point and it works surprisingly well as a mental shortcut. The north is the alternative side: music, bars, Victorian workers’ terraces, young people. The east is the expensive and leafy side. The west is the working-class, migrant side, where you eat best. And the south is the bay and the beach. With a tram and fifteen minutes you can reach any of the four.
The route, stop by stop
4 STOPS- 01
Fitzroy and Collingwood
Two suburbs pressed against the centre to the northeast, with Brunswick Street and Smith Street as parallel spines: bars, music rooms, record shops, restaurants, small galleries and Victorian brick terraces with iron balconies. It’s where young Melbourne goes and where the live music scene is, which here is a serious matter.
The history runs opposite to how it looks today: Fitzroy was Melbourne’s first suburb and for most of the twentieth century it was a poor one, of workers’ housing and a bad name, with public housing towers that are still there among the cafés. That contrast hasn’t been erased and you see it on foot: the social housing tower and the specialty coffee shop on the same block.
It’s the same old cycle, but here it’s still half done, and that’s why the suburb still has an edge.
- 02
Brunswick and the north
Further north, Brunswick organises itself along Sydney Road, a street that runs kilometre after kilometre dead straight with the tram down the middle. It’s one of those streets you walk end to end: Lebanese bridal shops, Turkish grills, vinyl bars, breweries, workshops and music venues, all mixed with no order at all.
That disorder is what to see, because it tells the city’s layers of immigration stacked on each other: the Italians came, then the Greeks, then the Lebanese and the Turks, and on top of all that the young people who can’t afford Fitzroy have now settled. Nobody has erased anybody: they’re all still there, on the same pavement. Eat Turkish or Lebanese here, which is where it’s genuinely good, and do it somewhere with fluorescent lighting.
- 03
St Kilda and the bay
Melbourne’s beach suburb, half an hour by tram. What it isn’t needs saying up front: this isn’t an ocean beach like Sydney’s. It’s the bay, the water is flat, there are no waves and there’s no surf. Anyone coming for that will be let down.
What it is: a long promenade with people skating, a pier, and Luna Park, the 1912 amusement park with the giant mouth at the entrance and one of the oldest wooden roller coasters still running in the world. And Acland Street, the street of central European cake shops, a legacy of postwar Jewish immigration, with windows full of pastries. The suburb had decades of a bad name and today it’s an odd mix of families, tourists and what’s left of the other thing.
On the pier there are wild penguins at dusk, and they’re free.
- 04
The west, which almost nobody crosses
Across the river the west begins, which was the city’s industrial and port zone and which for decades carried the label of a place you don’t go. Today Footscray is ten minutes by train from the centre and it’s probably Melbourne’s most interesting suburb for eating, precisely because it hasn’t turned into something else yet.
It’s a migrant suburb: Vietnamese above all, and East African, and everything else. The market sells herbs and fish no supermarket has, and the restaurants are fluorescent-lit rooms where an enormous plate costs half what it does in the grid. If you’re only going to make one trip out of the centre in Melbourne, make it this one and not the beach.
And take this city’s general rule with you: the fifteen-minute train always pays.
Frequently asked
Where to stay in Melbourne?
In the centre’s grid if you want the lanes and the free tram at the door, though it’s the priciest. Fitzroy and Collingwood, ten minutes by tram, have the night and the music. St Kilda if you want the bay, half an hour south. And Brunswick works out cheaper and sits on the Sydney Road tram line, which runs straight into the centre.
What’s the best neighbourhood in Melbourne?
It depends what you’re after: Fitzroy and Collingwood for the night and live music, Brunswick and Sydney Road to see the city’s layers of immigration on one street, Footscray, to the west, to eat Vietnamese better and for half the price, and St Kilda for the beach, knowing it’s bay and there are no waves. All are under half an hour from the centre by tram or train.